Former Transit Officer Dic Donohue reflects on the day he almost lost his life in 2013

BOSTON — Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Winchester native and Transit Officer Dic Donohue was seriously wounded in a shootout with the Tsarnaev brothers in Watertown and nearly died.

As we mark 10 years since that week, Donohue sat down with Boston 25 News anchor Mark Ockerbloom to talk about what he remembers of that life-changing event.

“My memories are still a little hazy and some of it’s more of just an overall feeling that I recall. But I did have that split-second memory of, that’s it, that’s it,” Donohue recalled.

Donohue had suffered a severe gunshot wound to the leg. He would have bled out, if not for the heroic efforts of many.

“I owe them, you know, each and every person, whether they drove the ambulance or threw me in the back of the ambulance or stuck their hands inside my leg or jumped on top of a gurney to stop the bleeding… I owe all of them a debt of gratitude,” he said.

Donohue also survived thanks to blood donors. It’s something he’s become a proponent of in the last 10 years.

“It’s one of these things I took for granted. I never donated blood before,” Donohue said. “When I really did start to learn about it and then after surgeries and what have you and I was able to do it, I became a blood donor to at least put a little bit of dent in what I took from all the folks that had given.”

In the last decade, Donohue retired from the transit police, went back to school and got his Ph.D. in criminology and now works for the Rand Corporation. He also works in a national training program for police officers on officer safety and wellness.

Though he says he still has pain in his leg every day and can no longer run, his wife Kim is going to run this year’s marathon.

Donohue says, he feels very fortunate to have things turn out the way they did.

“It is certainly something I didn’t expect, and I like to think of myself as an ordinary person that’s been put through an extraordinary series of events. And that’s really the only way I can, you know, reconcile that.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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